In May a lawyer for a black newspaper carrier victimized by Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer (photo, left) obtained an anti-harassment order against him (see story here), but Troyer allegedly violated the order on “multiple occasions,” and now a judge has ordered him to post $100,000 bail to stay out of jail, a Seattle TV station reported on Friday, July 1, 2022 (story here).
The state attorney general asked for $10,000 bail, but the judge called Troyer “a danger to the community,” and thought it wasn’t enough to stop his behavior, KOMO 4 News said.
Troyer’s trial begins July 11, 2022, on the original false reporting charges from an incident in January 2021 when Troyer accosted Altheimer on his paper route, called down a law enforcement army on him, and falsely claimed Altheimer threatened him. Troyer has pleaded not guilty to those charges.
He was back in court Friday after an encounter with Sedrick Altheimer in April, which he insisted was happenstance, but the judge didn’t believe him (see story in the Spokane Spokesman Review here), in effect calling the sheriff a liar. An assistant attorney general characterized Troyer’s conduct as witness intimidation.
Altheimer, who says he quit his newspaper delivery job because of Troyer’s continuing harassment, is suing Pierce County for $5 million of damages. The lawsuit alleges Troyer racially profiled him during the original incident, and the continuing harassment is racially motivated. The county is potentially liable because Troyer is a county employee when acting as sheriff.
Because he’s an elected official, Troyer can’t be fired, only removed by a recall election. But calls have mounted for his resignation (see story here), and the Pierce County prosecutor has put him on a so-called “Brady List” of law enforcement personnel whose “repeated incidents of making false statements or other issues that could cast doubt on their credibility” make them unreliable witnesses in court (see story here).
Troyer is just one example, of many across the country, of elected sheriffs who puff their chests, act as a law unto themselves, and regard themselves as above the law. Reining them in can be very difficult if they’re popular with the voters of their home turf, as they often are.
Voters of King County, Washington’s largest county, which includes the city of Seattle, changed the sheriff’s office from an elective to an appointed position after a series of disappointing elected sheriffs, although none engaged in conduct as egregious as Troyer’s.
Related story: A similar incident occurred in Michigan, where an off-duty cop pulled a gun on a black newspaper carrier because delivering newspapers looked “suspicious” to him; see story here. Unlike Troyer, that cop faces felony charges.